Review by Booklist Review
Scottish hard-boiled writers like Ian Rankin, Val McDermid, and Denise Mina are the literary equivalents of post-Calvin church architecture: spiky, gray, grim. In her Glasgow novels, Mina, especially, finds the emotional equivalent of what her characters endure and what some inflict on others in the unrelievedly bleak tenements and back ways of the wrong side of town. She introduces a new heroine here, a young woman, Paddy Meehan, who works as a gofer at a Glasgow daily in 1981. The story centers on the horrific killing of a little boy by two other boys. Paddy gets drawn into the case through her recognition that one of the boys charged is related to her fiance. Although the connection and Paddy's involvement are a bit of a stretch, the novel offers a fascinating look at sexism and newspaper politics--and a reminder of how tough it is to be poor and ambitious. --Connie Fletcher Copyright 2005 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
If this novel were a movie, filmgoers would tag it the one to beat for the Oscars. Beyond creating sweaty physical tension, the brilliant Mina may have invented a subgenre: moral suspense. Patricia "Paddy" Meehan, a copygirl at Glasgow's Daily News, has struggled with issues of goodness since childhood. "I knew I was lying when I made my first communion," she confesses to fianc? Sean Ogilvy the night she delivers other shockers. She won't marry him. And she wants his help interviewing his 10-year-old cousin, Callum, who's been charged with murdering a toddler. Scots are deemed legally responsible at eight, but Paddy sees Callum as another victim. Paddy, who shares a nickname with a career criminal wrongfully imprisoned for murder, can't tolerate injustice. At the heart of the plot is her decision pose as colleague Heather Allen when she makes dangerous inquiries, a choice that spells death for the real Heather, who's everything Paddy isn't: slim blonde whistle bait-and ambitious enough to steal a story from Paddy. After Heather's murder, the reader writhes, not just because Paddy's in danger but because a moment of awful truth awaits her. Mina spins the complexities in the rough music of her working-class Scots, unsparing of brutal details, but unfailingly elegant in her humanity. Agent, Henry Dunow. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
A bonny wean is brutally murdered in gritty Glasgow (a city where a bloke can earn himself a beating for flourishing an umbrella), and the guilty parties seem all too obvious-two children barely older than the victim. Paddy Meehan is working as a lowly gofer at the city newspaper and trying desperately to placate her multiple demons: her Catholic heritage, her ambition, her family's grinding poverty, and her weight. When she discovers that one of the alleged murderers is her fianc?'s cousin, she starts her own investigation, using the name of a real reporter at the paper. When that reporter turns up dead, it's an open question if Paddy has bitten off more than even she can chew. The first volume in a promised, and promising, new series from Mina (Deception), this should earn her even more fans and cement her position as Glasgow's retort to other Scottish luminaries like Val McDermid and Ian Rankin. A thoroughly engaging read; suitable for all public libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 3/15/05.]-Bob Lunn, Kansas City P.L., MO (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
It's 1981 when the murder of a three-year-old boy, based on the notorious James Bulger case, leads to another walk on Glasgow's wild side. Patricia Meehan is so shocked to find that one of the two boys arrested for the murder of little Brian Wilcox is her fiancÉ Sean Ogilvy's cousin Callum that she blurts out the news to Heather Allen, an ambitious columnist at the Scottish Daily News, where Paddy works as a copyboy. Heather, who's everything Paddy isn't--thin, well-bred, college-educated--urges her to write a feature on the boy and his family and, when Paddy refuses, files the story herself. Now Paddy, already snubbed by her hard-drinking colleagues, gets a massive cold shoulder from her own family, convinced she's sold them out to advance her career. Paddy's only hope for what passes for redemption in Mina's brutal cityscape is to join forces with raffish reporter Terry Hewitt--the one who calls her a fat lassie--in looking more closely into a case everyone in town has already closed with a bang. As if her own investigation weren't dark enough, Mina (Deception, 2004, etc.) introduces a running counterpoint: the real-life case of Paddy's namesake, a burglar convicted in 1969 of murder despite his pleas of innocence and released only after seven years in a solitary confinement little more stifling than the Scottish Daily News. Mina is a ruthlessly accomplished surgeon of souls who can strip her living characters as bare as Patricia Cornwell does her corpses. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
